青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Faced with the prospect of death coming for me perhaps the next day, I found myself looking upon children and being seized by the need to paint them and—possibly because my experiences had brought me to reflect hard on my own being—the need, too, to solidly manifest myself in those paintings. Those urges were most compelling.

——Aso Saburo (artist)

To discover the artistically pure effect evident in such unspoiled sensibilities gives me great joy as a painter.

——Matsumoto Shunsuke (artist), on a drawing by his young son in the mid-1940s

How did artists in Japan depict children living through the wartime and postwar turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s? And what kinds of art did those children themselves encounter? This volume looks at the gaze of artists of the time toward children—whom they figured as embodiments of hope—and at artworks of and for children in light of the historical context.